Search for aged care help in Australia and most of the results are not what they appear to be. Some are providers writing about their own services. Others are businesses paid by providers for sending you to them.
None of that is illegal, and some of those services are genuinely useful. But it changes what you are reading, and almost none of them explain it clearly. Here is how the money actually moves.
The three kinds of site you will find
Providers. Aged care operators publishing guides about aged care. The information is often accurate. It is also written by an organisation that would like you to choose its homes, and it will rarely tell you when a competitor would suit you better.
Placement and comparison services. Businesses that ask about your situation, then match you with providers. Free to you. Paid by the provider.
Government. My Aged Care and the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing. No commercial interest, but written to be comprehensive rather than readable, and organised around how the system works rather than around what you are trying to do.
How placement services get paid
The common model is a fee from the provider when a person the service referred moves in and starts paying. The service costs the family nothing directly.
Some operators publish this clearly. Aged Care Decisions, for example, states on its own site that it charges providers a placement fee, that families pay nothing, and that providers cannot pay more for better placement.
Others say only that their service is free to families, without explaining who does pay. That is the pattern worth noticing. A service can be free to you and still have a commercial reason to steer you somewhere.
Why this matters even when the service is good
A referral business can only refer you to providers it has an arrangement with. That is not a criticism, it is just how the model works. But it means the shortlist you receive is drawn from a subset of the market, not from all of it, and the size of that subset is rarely stated.
If a provider near you has no agreement with that service, you will probably never hear about it. It might have been the right one.
Where a fee varies with the value of the placement rather than being flat, there is a structural incentive to favour higher value options. Whether any particular operator does that is not something we can see from the outside. It is a reason to ask.
What Australian Consumer Law requires
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has published guidance for comparison websites. In broad terms it expects them to make honest like for like comparisons, disclose commercial relationships that could affect recommendations, be transparent about how much of the market they cover, and avoid presenting themselves as independent while being paid by the businesses they recommend.
The ACCC has taken action against comparison services in other sectors, including energy and insurance, for exactly this kind of gap between how a service presents itself and how it is funded.
Questions worth asking any service that offers to help you find care
How do you make money?
Do the providers you recommend pay you?
Is that fee the same for every provider, or does it vary?
How many providers in my area do you have arrangements with, and how many are there in total?
What happens to my personal information? Who else receives it?
Will you tell me about providers you have no arrangement with?
A service comfortable with its own model will answer these without difficulty. Hesitation is itself an answer.
Where to get help with no commercial interest at all
My Aged Care, 1800 200 422, arranges assessments and lists every registered provider, not a subset.
Older Persons Advocacy Network, 1800 700 600, is free, independent, and funded to act for the older person.
Services Australia Financial Information Service officers explain fees and means assessments at no cost.
None of these will call you back to check how you are going, because none of them are trying to sell you anything.
How Aged Care HQ is funded
At the moment, it is not. Nobody pays us and we do not take money from providers.
We intend to build a directory, and we intend to charge providers to be part of it. When that happens we will say so on every page it affects, we will explain exactly how the fee works, and we will not accept payment for better placement in results.
Holding other people to a standard means publishing your own. If we ever stop meeting it, this page is the one to hold us to.